FOOD & DRINK | 39
Renée Watson
THE BIG BANG If your lockdown has been anything like mine it looks a bit like this: home school, eat, drink, work, work, eat, home school and drink, watch some telly, eat a bit more… drink a bit more and look at all the people running and cycling with a mixture of envy and loathing. This is clearly a recipe for waistline disaster so I’ve developed a plan to solve this problem with nothing more than a little wrist action and some science. Here’s my top-secret tip: forget calorie counting and get cold. That’s right people, new research shows that dropping the temperature will help you drop pounds. With as little as a one-degree reduction in your living room temperature, you could increase your metabolic rate. Forget fad diets and spending loads of money on so-called fat burning pills, get your kit off and chill. The science behind this cool revelation comes down to the two types of fat you have in your body. White fat, the stuff that makes your trousers too tight and is designed to store energy. The other type of fat is brown fat that does the opposite – a bit like a wood fired stove, they are fat-fuelled machines that burn energy to heat you up. Brown fat is the stuff that makes you shiver and it is the act of shivering that heats you up. We have long thought that humans can’t generate brown fat but in fact it seems we can. And we do it when we are in an environment that is just a little cooler than the balmy 19 degrees the average person finds to be comfortable room temperature. Interestingly, increasing production of brown fat cells seems to be reliant on the immune system rather than the brain. A particular type of immune cell called a macrophage can cause the browning of a white fat cell, therefore converting it from a chubby fat storage machine to that raging fat-burning stove. Dr Ajay Chawla, from UC San Francisco, who has been leading the research said that in the mice they tested they saw calorie burning equivalent to about 30 minutes of exercise per day. Humans are not expected to benefit to quite that extent but Dr Chawla suggests that even an increase in metabolism of a few percent would make a big difference. The ideal temperature for this weight loss wonder is thought to be around 17.2 degrees centigrade, although tests in humans will be the only way to know how to make the most of the chill. Ok, so in reality, unfortunately this doesn’t mean I can eat ice cream straight from the tub, drink an entire bottle of bubbly and binge-watch Netflix and still lose weight. I just like to think of it as freebie weight loss on top of eating a reasonably healthy diet and doing regular exercise. Now then, where are my trainers?
JULY 2020 OX MAGAZINE
